Can Trump's And Kim's Insults Lead To War?

President Donald Trump and North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, engaged in an exchange of insults and threats Saturday, continuing a long-running spat that could end in Armageddon.

Ri, during his U.N. General Assembly speech, said Trump’s words were making a North Korean strike on “the entire U.S. mainland inevitable.”

Trump reacted to Ho’s provocative comment in a late-night tweet. He stated this, referring to Ri: “If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”

The controversy took on new life after Trump’s General Assembly speech Tuesday.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” the president said. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

Trump’s statement, in substance, was merely a restatement of decades-old U.S. deterrence policy, and he was careful in his phrasing, making it clear he was talking about retaliation for an attack.

The North Koreans used to be similarly cautious, always couching their bombastic threats in the context of a previous American assault on their regime.

Ri, on Saturday, did not do that. He indicated Trump’s diminishment of the dignity of the North was, by itself, making war inevitable.

Pyongyang, therefore, is no longer talking self-defense. The regime of Kim Jong Un appears to be threatening to strike first.

The implications of North Korea’s posture are frightening. The regime’s words almost give the U.S. a justification for a pre-emptive strike, a military action to eliminate an imminent danger. After all, the North looks like it is promising to destroy the American homeland in a first strike.

Trump has a knack for getting under the skin of adversaries. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, will start World War III because Kim has felt personally diminished by Trump.

Yet just because Rocket Man will not launch a war over an insult does not mean Trump should feel free to hurl slurs in the direction of Pyongyang. On the contrary, his attention-grabbing assessments of Kim’s mental condition—the American leader in an early morning tweet Friday said Kim was “obviously a madman”—are undercutting his administration’s efforts to disarm the North.

Thursday, Trump made great progress in that cause, announcing comprehensive sanctions against the Kimist state. The new rules, contained in an executive order, start a new round of coercive diplomacy that could actually force Pyongyang to disarm.

Trump’s new measures go after, among other things, foreign financial institutions that “knowingly” either conduct or facilitate “any significant transaction in connection with trade with North Korea” or engage in dealings with designated parties. Banks involved in such prohibited dealings can lose access to dollar accounts, essentially a death sentence.

Also targeted are those conducting business with North Korea even if such business was not related to the North’s weapons programs.

Following the announcement of the executive order, Trump needed the world to be talking about cutting off the flow of funds to Kim so that he will not have the resources for nukes, missiles, or “gift politics,” the buying of the loyalty of senior regime elements with luxury items. Instead, people are now focusing on the infantile trading of names by two grown men who can launch nukes.

Remember “sticks and stones”? “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me.”

I lived and worked in Shanghai and Hong Kong for almost two decades and now write primarily on China, Asia, and nuclear proliferation. I am the author of two Random House books, The Coming Collapse of China and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. My writings ha...